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Dejan Matić, Department of Linguistics, University of Cologne, Germany

Laurence R. Horn and Gregory Ward's ''Handbook of Pragmatics'' is a collection of original articles intended to give a full picture of the principal topics in theoretical and applied pragmatics. It is divided into four parts, organized ''thematically rather than doctrinally'' (p. xviii): ''The Domain of Pragmatics'', ''Pragmatics and Discourse Structure'', ''Pragmatics and its Interfaces'' and ''Pragmatics and Cognition''; there are 32 chapters, mostly between 20 and 25 pages in length.

SUMMARY

The Handbook opens with an (impressive) list of contributors and an introduction, in which the editors delimit the scope of the book, explain the principles of organization of the material and give a short overview of the contents.

The first part, THE DOMAIN OF PRAGMATICS, addresses the fundamental themes of classical pragmatics -- implicature, presupposition, reference, speech acts, etc. The chapter on implicature by Laurence Horn (pp. 3-28) contains an extensive discussion of most of the relevant aspects of its topic, from basic definitional and taxonomic issues to the role of implicature in semantic change, from the ancient history to the latest revisions. At the same time, this chapter is an ideal introduction to the Gricean approach to pragmatics, which underlies most of modern pragmatics as well as most of the chapters in the Handbook. In the chapter on presupposition (pp. 29-52), Jay David Atlas first provides a succinct account of the main classical approaches to presupposition, Frege's semantic interpretation, Stalnaker's common-ground account and the somewhat ambiguous position of Grice, uncovering inconsistencies in all three. This is used as a background against which Atlas' own, Neo-Gricean explanation of the phenomenon is developed, which, starting from Lewis' notion of accommodation, in effect reduces presupposition to a kind of conversational implicature based on the non-controversiality of the implicated content. The third chapter, by Jerrold Sadock (pp. 53-73), deals with speech acts. After a brief history of the speech act theory, covering Austin, Searle and various Strawson-style objections to the theory, the notions such as locution, illocution and perlocution, propositional speech act, illocutionary force, etc. are introduced. Separate sections are devoted to the difficult questions of the classification of illocutionary acts, their relationship with grammar and to the problem of indirect speech acts.

The chapter on reference by Gregory Carlson (pp. 74-96) provides a good overview of the major theories of reference (Frege, Russell, Strawson and Kripke), which is followed by an enlightening discussion of the issues arising from the fundamental question of the pragmatic vs. semantic nature of reference. Stephen C. Levinson's contribution (pp. 97-121) is about deixis, which is, as the author shows, pervasive in natural languages. Furthermore: ''The deictic system is embedded in a context-independent descriptive system, in such a way that the two systems produce a third that is not reducible to either'' (p. 99). Levinson goes on to identify the distinctive features of indexicals and outlines their treatment in semantics and pragmatics. The chapter closes with a comprehensive account of the typology of deictic systems in the world's languages. The final chapter of the first part, ''Definiteness and Indefiniteness'' by Barbara Abbott (pp. 122-149), starts off with an approximate delimitation of the phenomenological fields of definiteness and indefiniteness; the following four sections tackle the topics of specificity, weak and strong determiners (in the sense of Milsark 1974), and the uniqueness and familiarity accounts of definiteness, which are discussed and critically evaluated in an illuminating fashion.

The second part, PRAGMATICS AND DISCOURSE STRUCTURE, contains papers on a broad range of topics pertaining to the realm of discourse. It opens with the chapter ''Information Structure and Non-canonical Syntax'' by Gregory Ward and Betty Birner (pp. 153-174), devoted to the influence of the cognitive status of the denotations of linguistic expressions on the non-canonical word order in English. The chapter on topic and focus, written by Jeanette K. Gundel and Thorstein Fretheim (pp. 175-196), is an excellent introduction to the elusive phenomena of information structure. After a short historical overview, the authors clarify a number of terminological issues (semantic/pragmatic vs. syntactic notions of topic and focus, referential vs. relational givenness and newness, etc.), and outline the principal properties of topic and focus and their subtypes. This notional apparatus is then used to illustrate how information structure may interact with language form and what truth-conditional effects it may have. Chapter 9, ''Context in Dynamic Interpretation'' by Craige Roberts (pp. 197-220), deals with the models of context in dynamic semantics. The chapter follows the historical development of the theories of context, from the simple context model in the early Montagovian semantics, through the enriched models devised by Heim and Kamp, to the fully developed intentional theory of context and discourse interpretation based on the works of Stalnaker, Grice and Roberts herself, with a short review of Asher and Lascarides' Segmented Discourse Representation Theory.

In chapter 10 (''Discourse Markers'', pp. 221-240), Diane Blakemore discusses a class of expressions (which is, as Blakemore notes, perhaps not a unitary class at all), traditionally grouped together because of their lack of impact on truth conditions and/or because they do not denote concepts, such as 'well', 'after all', 'therefore', etc. Three approaches to discourse markers are introduced: the Gricean account in terms of conventional implicatures, the Argumentation Theory approach and the relevance-theoretic explanation, which capitalizes on the opposition between the procedural and the conceptual meanings. The chapter closes with an examination of the relationship between discourse markers and discourse coherence. The latter is the main topic of the following chapter, ''Discourse Coherence'' by Andrew Kehler (pp. 241-265), which deals with the means of establishing coherence in discourse, focusing on the rhetorical relations between utterances. After a summary of results of coherence research in psycholinguistics, theoretical and computational linguistics, Kehler's own theory is presented, in which coherence relations are systematically derived from a limited number of more primitive features. As a conclusion, it is demonstrated how coherence may restrict the applicability of certain linguistic forms. In Chapter 12, ''The Pragmatics of Non-sentences'' (pp. 266-287), Robert J. Stainton explores non-sentential utterances which constitute speech acts in spite of the non-propositional nature of their content.

Chapter 13, ''Anaphora and the Pragmatics-Syntax Interface'' by Yan Huang (pp. 288-314), offers a pragmatic interpretation of what came to be known as binding phenomena due to the wide influence of Chomskyan linguistics. The author repudiates the prevailing syntactic interpretation of anaphoric binding and gives an outline of a Neo-Gricean approach to intrasentential anaphora; this approach explains a wider array of phenomena than any kind of syntactic explanation, and in a more systematic way. In Chapter 14, ''Empathy and Direct Discourse Perspectives'' (pp. 315-343), Susumu Kuno demonstrates that the principle of empathy, defined as the speaker's identification with a participant in the described event, and the direct discourse perspective, the presentation of a situation as a quote, are necessary in order to capture a large number of apparently unmotivated syntactic restrictions. Geoffrey Nunberg's contribution, ''The Pragmatics of Deferred Interpretation'' (pp. 344-364), tackles one of the fundamental issues of meaning, the relationship between what is traditionally known as literal and figurative meanings. After a discussion of the opposition between conventional and pragmatically derived meanings, Nunberg demonstrates how ubiquitous the phenomenon of deference (of which figuration is only a subclass) is; he then proceeds to explain the mechanism of meaning transfer, which underlies deference, and its functioning in systematic polysemy, semantic composition and in syntax in general.

Chapter 16, ''Pragmatics of Language Performance'' by Herbert H. Clark (pp. 365-382) explores the ways in which joint commitments and coordination between interlocutors are established in natural discourse. Two principal mechanisms are distinguished -- displays, which help interlocutors ground the coordinates of the speech event, and collateral signals, designed to refer to the ongoing performance. Part II of the Handbook closes with Andrew Kehler and Gregory Ward's ''Constraints on Ellipsis and Event Reference'' (pp. 383-403), which examines the nature of verbal anaphora in English (gapping, VP ellipsis, 'so' anaphora and pronominal event reference). On the basis of the evidence from these constructions, the authors suggest a number of improvements to the theory of anaphora and to the given-new taxonomy.

In the third part of the Handbook, PRAGMATICS AND ITS INTERFACES, the overarching topic is the interaction of pragmatics with other components of grammar and/or other linguistic subdisciplines. Chapter 18, ''Some Interactions of Pragmatics and Grammar'' by Georgia M. Green (pp. 407-426) illustrates the influence of pragmatics on grammar with a wide range of pragmatically marked constructions in English (passive, raising, praesens pro futuro, extraposition, negation raising, sluicing, preposing, main verb inversion, etc.) and presents a number of possible answers to the question of how pragmatic values of syntactic constructions are to be represented in the linguistic theory. In chapter 19, ''Pragmatics and Argument Structure'' (pp. 427-441), Adele E. Goldberg shows that variations in argument structure are for a greater part pragmatically conditioned. She gives an account of Du Bois' theory of Preferred Argument Structure and illustrates it with sentence focus constructions, variable encodings of ditransitives, argument omission principles and with a very convincing explanation of the phenomenon of obligatory adjuncts.

François Recanati's excellent ''Pragmatics and Semantics'' (pp. 442-462) traces the current discussions on the delimitation of semantics and pragmatics to the dispute between ideal language philosophers and ordinary language philosophers and provides a short overview of the subsequent approaches to the semantics-pragmatics distinction (semantic meaning as: 1. truth-conditional meaning, 2. context-free meaning, 3. conventional meaning), demonstrating that all are laden with insurmountable problems. The popular idea that the processes involved in semantic decoding and pragmatic reasoning constitute a sound basis for distinguishing between them is also shown to have its weaknesses. Recanati instead opts for a truth-conditional pragmatics of sorts, which distinguishes between three levels of meaning (subpropositional linguistic meaning, pragmatically enriched propositional literal content and pragmatically conveyed meaning). Kent Bach's chapter ''Pragmatics and Philosophy of Language'' (pp. 463-487) addresses similar issues, with an unmistakably Gricean slant. First a number of pragmatic phenomena are presented (performatives, illocutionary acts, communicative intentions, inference, relevance, the notion of saying and of implicature); this is then followed by a discussion of the semantics-pragmatics distinction, with a demonstration of its usefulness for solving certain problems of the philosophy of language (speech act and assertion fallacies, the meanings of logical connectors and quantifiers).

The next chapter, ''Pragmatics and the Lexicon'' (pp. 488-514) by Reinhard Blutner, examines the interaction between pragmatics and the lexicon from the perspective of Optimality Theory. Lexical meanings are assumed to be heavily underspecified, reaching their full interpretation only through the mechanism of pragmatic strengthening based on the Neo-Gricean Q and I principles. Lexical semantics and lexical pragmatics are distinguished along the lines of compositionality, monotonicity and the persistence of anomaly. The principle of pragmatic strengthening itself is represented within the framework of Bidirectional OT. Chapter 23, ''Pragmatics and Intonation'' by Julia Hirschberg (pp. 515-537) provides many examples of how intonation may influence the interpretation of utterances. In chapter 24, ''Historical Pragmatics'' (pp. 538-561), Elisabeth Closs Traugott outlines the role of pragmatics in language change, concentrating on the two most important theoretical contributions to this area: Horn's Q and R principles and their applications in the processes of triggering autohyponymy and polysemy, lexical blocking, etc., and Levinson's Q, M, and I heuristics together with his view of semantic change as a process involving a sequence from particularized through generalized conversational implicatures to conventional meanings. Additionally, a number of issues related to the actual course of linguistic change (reanalysis, language acquisition, subjectification, etc.) are discussed. Finally, the functioning of the whole theoretical apparatus is illustrated through the example of the development of the English discourse marker 'after all'. Eve C. Clark's contribution, ''Pragmatics and Language Acquisition'' (pp. 562-577) summarizes the results of mostly psycholinguistic and psychological research on the development of pragmatic competence with children. The issues described, among others, are the establishment of joint attention and common ground, recognition of speech acts and speakers' intentions, turn taking and politeness, etc. The last chapter in Part III, Daniel Jurafsky's ''Pragmatics and Computational Linguistics'' (pp. 578-604), argues for a probabilistic mechanism of speech act interpretation.

Not surprisingly, the last part, PRAGMATICS AND COGNITION, opens with two chapters on Relevance Theory, Wilson and Sperber's ''Relevance Theory'' (pp. 607-632) and Carston's ''Relevance Theory and Saying/Implicating Distinction'' (pp. 633-656). Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber give a useful and up-to-date summary of the approach to pragmatics they established in their 1986 book (Sperber & Wilson 1986). This very clearly written chapter introduces the basic tenets of Relevance Theory stepwise, through well formulated definitions (relevance, cognitive principle of relevance, ostensive-inferential communication, communicative principle of relevance, presumption of optimal relevance, explicature vs. implicature), discussing the phenomena that can be better accounted for through the relevance-theoretic account than through competing approaches, such as loose talk, lexical variation, irony, etc. In conclusion, they argue for a special-purpose inferential comprehension module of mind and present some results of experimental research confirming the tenets of Relevance Theory. Robyn Carston's ''Relevance Theory and Saying/Implicating Distinction'' is devoted to the difference between explicit and implicit communication. The dividing line in Relevance Theory is first that between decoding and inferring, and then, within the inferential domain, the one between the inferences that further develop the logical form of the decoded message and those that are partially independent of it. Thus the trichotomy ''(subpropositional) logical form -- explicature -- implicature'' (obviously cognate to Recanati's approach) is defined as an alternative to the mainstream dichotomy ''truth-conditional semantics vs. non-truth conditional pragmatics'' (or, somewhat different, ''what is said vs. what is implicated/meant''). The chapter offers rich and well presented material illustrating different types of explicature and implicature, including the much debated notion of generalized conversational implicature. What makes Carston's contribution especially worth reading is its comparative perspective: for all phenomena mentioned, not only the relevance-theoretical, but also the alternative approaches, are discussed, along with their merits and faults.

Chapter 29, ''Pragmatics and Cognitive Linguistics'' by Gilles Fauconnier (pp. 657-674) outlines the role of pragmatics in a cognition-based linguistic theory, claiming that the cognitive view of linguistic faculty does not justify the division of meaning into literal and figurative, indeed that the semantics-pragmatics distinction has no place in this model, as both are derivable from the manipulation of mental spaces. This is the only paper in the Handbook which takes a position similar to that of ordinary language philosophers. In the next chapter, ''Pragmatic Aspects of Grammatical Constructions'' (pp. 675-700), Paul Kay convincingly demonstrates that different kinds of pragmatic information belong to the constraints which define grammatical constructions and govern their use, thus complementing Green's chapter on pragmatics and syntax; especially instructive is his exposition of the way the Scalar Model for dealing with scalar pragmatic phenomena works in the 'let alone' construction in English. The penultimate chapter of the Handbook, Michael Israel's ''The Pragmatics of Polarity'' (pp. 701-723) sheds light on various aspects of polarity. The focus is on two issues: on the pragmatic markedness of negation and on polarity items. The latter are shown to belong to the class of scalar operators, whose usage constraints are easily explained once the pragmatic of informativity is taken into account. The book closes with a chapter on abduction by Jerry R. Hobbs (''Abduction in Natural Language Understanding'', pp. 724-741). Hobbs opts for abduction (non-monotonic mode or reasoning in which Q and P … Q lead to the conclusion that [probably] P) as the most realistic model of everyday reasoning, qua the most realistic model of everyday utterance interpretation. He demonstrates how interpretation via abduction works within the AI framework in local and global pragmatic processes and compares the AI abduction model with Relevance Theory, emphasizing the similarities. The use of abduction in utterance generation, language acquisition, etc. are addressed in the final section of the chapter.

The Handbook closes with a 77 page list of references (pp. 742-819) and a concise index (pp. 820-842).

EVALUATION

In evaluating ''The Handbook'', I shall follow the trivial form-content pattern, meaning that I shall first focus on the more or less formal issues and then turn to the content-oriented evaluation.

FORM

On the whole, ''The Handbook of Pragmatics'' is very well edited, with only a couple of minor irritating points. Two decisions of the publisher render the book less than optimally user-friendly: first, endnotes instead of footnotes, second, the common list of references for all chapters at the end of the book instead of a separate list for each chapter. I suppose that references placed at the end of the book, a common practice in all Blackwell's handbooks, serve to save space and avoid overlappings, but (a) it not always an easy task to find a reference in a 77 page list; and (b) it is a problem for people who need a photocopy of only one or two chapters (though, the latter may have been an additional reason for the publisher to adopt the references-last strategy). Endnotes, which many publishers seem to love for reasons beyond my comprehension, are a torture for the reader: one looses the thread of the main body of the text and wastes time finding notes, often just to be confronted with a bibliographical reference which one could have dispensed with at that point.

Typos are very few and mostly easy to repair (at least I could not find many). Among the few potentially confusing instances is ''the unreducible [sic] maxim of Quantity'' (p. 297), where certainly the maxim of QUALITY is meant. On p. 539 something went wrong with the syntax in the following passage: ''Although some very important theoretical work has been based on dictionaries, claims made by scholars like Bréal (1900) and Ullmann (1959), or introspection (see especially Horn 1984a and passim), much recent historical pragmatics is based in textual data.'' Capitalized 'autohyponOmy' on p. 542 should read 'autohyponYmy' (this is an obvious typo, but some linguists do tend to use hyponOmy instead of hyponYmy, obviously unaware that the former would mean something like ''digging of underground channels'' in Ancient Greek). Finally, there is a potentially misleading capitalization of 'and' on p. 620 (''compare the concept SQUARE, SQUARE* AND SQUARE**''). There are practically no ghost references (works referred to in the text but irretrievable from the list of references) apart from ''van Rooy to appear a'' (p. 27, n.10) and ''van Rooy to appear b'' (p. 513, n. 10). Non-English names and examples are also almost flawlessly printed, except for the following two in the list of references: Ballmer (1972) did not write anything on ''DiskurswelteR'' -- it is ''DiskurswelteN''; Geurts (1998) is said to have been published in a book named ''Lexicalische Semantik ... '' -- recte: ''LexiKalische ... ''. I wouldn't like to seem to be nitpicking, but having suffered innumerable mutilations of the hatcheck in my own name, I feel entitled to notice that Eva Hajičová (hatcheck on C, acute accent on A) regularly looses the accent on A (a sign of vowel length in Czech), and on p. 528 the hatcheck is also missing. And there is a missing accent aigu on E in ''Études'' in the list of references under Fauconnier (1976). But that's about all, and I must emphasize that so few typos is a remarkable achievement for a book of some 850 pages.

Although it is basically organized thematically, different theoretical doctrines and discipline-specific viewpoints inevitably found their way into the organizational principles of the Handbook. It is thus only natural that certain chapters partly overlap and/or complement each other in describing a phenomenon. For instance, if you want to get the full picture of classical implicatures, you should look up, in addition to Horn's chapter, at least Recanati, Kent and Blutner; on reference -- Carlson, Abbott and Levinson; on topic and focus -- Ward & Birner, Gundel & Fretheim, Roberts, Goldberg, etc.; on discourse interpretation -- Roberts, Blakemore and Kehler; on anaphorics -- at least Huang, Kuno and Kehler & Ward; lexical matters -- Horn, Blutner, Traugott, Wilson & Sperber, Carston; on syntax and pragmatics -- Ward & Birner, Kehler, Kuno, Kehler & Ward, Green, Goldberg, Kay, etc., etc. The editors wisely saw to it that the chapters with overlapping contents be interconnected through extensive cross-referencing. It is also a good thing that most of the chapters with related contents are, as far as the general organization of the book allows, adjacent to each other (with the possible exception of Blakemore's and H. Clark's article, which could stand closer to each other, given that they both cover the field of non-truth conditional, 'procedural' signs). The index may also be of some help here, although it is unfortunately not especially detailed: if you look under 'familiarity', you will find only references to two chapters (Abbott's and Ward & Birner's), although the term occurs often in the book; the same holds true for 'truth conditions', 'given-new distinction', etc.

Only in two cases do I have serious doubts about the appropriateness of the position of a chapter: I do not understand why Paul Kay's ''Pragmatic Aspects of Grammatical Constructions'' is included in the fourth part of the handbook (''Pragmatics and Cognition'') instead of the third (''Pragmatics and its Interfaces''), and the I am not sure that the rightful place for Nunberg's ''The Pragmatics of Deferred Interpretation'', dealing mostly with lexical matters, is the part of the book devoted to discourse structure. Otherwise, the organization of the book is clear and consistent.

CONTENT

''The Handbook of Pragmatics'' was eagerly awaited by those interested in pragmatics for quite some time, and it lives up to expectations: on the whole, I can only subscribe to Ivan Sag's cover-text characterization of the handbook as ''a stunning collection of essays, written by a cadre of the field's best'', though I have some reservations, as will become clear presently.

The field of pragmatics, a notoriously messy issue, is defined as follows in the introduction: ''... pragmatics is the study of those context-dependent aspects of meaning which are systematically abstracted away from in the construction of content or logical form'' (p. xi). As is clear from Recanati's contribution on pragmatics and semantics, none of the three criteria commonly conjured up in order to delimit pragmatics, context dependency, non-conventionality and non-truth-conditionality, are in themselves sufficient to set pragmatic meaning apart from other aspects of meaning; the editors therefore wisely include all three in their definition (context dependent, systematically abstracted away from in the derivation of the logical form). This is perhaps not a particularly stringent definition of the pragmatics-semantics distinction, but it is a good basis for drawing the boundaries of a linguistic discipline: the book is devoted to the theoretical and empirical aspects of the components of meaning which are context dependent, non-conventional, non-truth-conditional, or all three.

The field is further narrowed down in the following way: ''In this Handbook, we have attempted to address both the traditional and the extended goals of theoretical and empirical pragmatics. It should be noted, however, that other traditions -- especially among European scholars -- tend to employ a broader and more sociological conception of pragmatics that encompasses all aspects of language use not falling strictly within formal linguistic theory ... For reasons of space and coherence of presentation, we have largely restricted our coverage to the more narrowly circumscribed, mainly Anglo-American conception of linguistic and philosophical pragmatics and its applications'' (p. xi). Together with the above mentioned restriction to aspects of MEANING, implicitly understood as (something close to) propositionally expressible meaning, this implies that not only disciplines such as discourse analysis, conversation analysis, linguistic anthropology, etc., are not represented here, but also that those aspects of linguistic behavior which do not readily render themselves to propositional representation, such as rules of turn-taking, do not belong to the phenomena described (though there are hints to this kind of data in the chapters by Eve and Herbert Clark).

I can imagine that many will find this limitation unsatisfactory, since it leaves a considerable amount of work done in what is here dubbed broader pragmatics unaccounted for. I don't see this as a serious problem. Although it may be more of a sociological/cultural fact than a purely scholarly one, two types of pragmatics, the 'narrow' and the 'broad', or the philosophical and the sociological one, do exist, for better or for worse, and they do have different research traditions, deal with (at least in part) different topics and address different readerships. The editors have decided to cover only one type, for reasons of space, coherence, or personal preferences, and have explicitly announced this restriction, so that the reader can go on knowing what kind of information awaits her: what you see is what you get. Besides, those interested in broad pragmatics have excellent overviews in Verschueren et al. (1995ff.) and Mey (1998) at their disposal. What I do see as a problem, however, is the lack of reference to 'broad' pragmatic approaches in those cases in which the phenomenological field of the 'narrow' pragmatics intersects with that of the 'broad' one, not only because it bears witness to the reprehensible mutual ignorance (as opposed to laudable mutual knowledge) of the two research traditions, but also because in this way the reader gets only incomplete information on the issues concerning the given topic. In some cases at least, this is really a pity, since the 'broad' approach may have provided some fresh impulses to the meaning-oriented pragmatic research. I have more to say about this later.

In a review of a book like ''The Handbook of Pragmatics'', the issues that have to be addressed are not primarily originality or a creative solution to a problem, but rather accuracy, comprehensiveness, breadth of coverage, informativeness, and clarity of exposition (or, if you prefer, quality, quantity, relevance and manner). With these issues in mind, I shall first discuss some of the chapters and then the book as a whole.

A number of chapters in ''The Handbook'' threaten to become milestones in the field, being both perfect introductions and brilliant state-of-the-art reports. Already the first chapter in the book meets these criteria: Horn's 'Implicature' is both informative and up to date, maintaining a good balance between the general representation of the facts and the argumentation for the theoretical stance Horn himself takes (and a clear delimitation of both); the only thing I miss is a mention of the non-conventionality tests devised by Sadock (1978), and a reference to Green (1990) in the context of the discussion of the universality of Gricean principles. The same equilibrium of systematic presentation and convincing argumentation is found in Levinson's ''Deixis'' and Abbott's ''Definiteness'', which both give information on more or less everything relevant for their respective topics. In writing ''Topic and Focus'', Gundel and Fretheim were confronted with an extremely difficult task: in the last twenty years or so, the literature on information structure has literally boomed, resulting in thousands of works on the topic and the worst terminological chaos in modern linguistics I am aware of. The authors have mastered this task in the best possible way: their terminological and notional clarifications will probably become standard references. The historical part would have been richer if Seuren (1998), von Heusinger (1999) and Kruijff-Korbayová & Steedman (2003) had been referred to. A mention of the formal approaches to topic and focus (such as e.g. Krifka 1993 and Rooth 1992) and of the influential attempts to account for the cross-linguistic variation in this field (Kiss 1998), are the only remaining desiderata. A fair amount of terminological tidying up is also conducted in Craige Roberts' ''Context in Dynamic Interpretation''; apart from this, her account of formal theories of context and its role in interpretation is clear, well-written, and comprehensive; a reference to the related work by Klein & von Stutterheim (1987) and Büring (e.g. 2003) would have only strengthened it. François Recanati's ''Pragmatics and Semantics'' is a serious candidate for a classic, with its brief, clear and sovereign presentation of the attempts to establish a logically coherent delimitation of semantics and pragmatics. A word on those who deny the existence of such a limit, as many cognitive linguists do, would turn this chapter from a merely masterful to a masterful and complete discussion of the semantics-pragmatics distinction. Finally, if you want to find out what Relevance Theory is about, you should read the papers by Wilson & Sperber and Carston: both are so well-wired and so informative that I doubt that many unresolved questions are left.

This is not to say that the remaining chapters are not of high quality. In fact, the most fascinating feature of this book is the fact that, apart from very few disappointments, almost all chapters satisfy the criteria of excellence. For instance, if asked what to recommend as an introduction into the optimality-theoretic approach to pragmatics, I would without hesitation recommend Blutner's ''Pragmatics and the Lexicon''; Kehler's ''Discourse Coherence'' is a perfect first step in the world or rhetorical relations, Hobb's ''Abduction'' in the world of the AI approach to interpretation, etc. Some questions of style remain, however. The contributions of some of the authors resemble research papers rather than proper handbook-format chapters. Thus, I am inclined to think that a beginner in the field would have difficulties with Atlas' paper on presupposition (which I personally find quite attractive in its radical focusing on non-controversiality of the presupposed contents). An additional problem is that, being a research paper rather than a handbook chapter, Atlas' contribution ignores the approaches that are not directly in the focus of argumentation; for instance, the development of the presupposition theory from the Nineties -- e.g. van der Sandt (1992), Gaukler (1998), Abbott (2000), Beaver (2001), etc. -- is simply ignored. In a similar manner, Huang makes a convincing case against the Chomskyan syntactic account of reflexive pronouns and for pragmatically governed principles of reflexivization; however, in focusing on the refutation of one (very influential) approach to one (important) aspect of pronominal interpretation, this chapter falls short of giving a truly comprehensive account of the pragmatics of anaphora, both in terms of the approaches mentioned and of the phenomena covered. In addition to these cases, one or two papers offer less information than expected without the justification of bringing new research results. However, these are true exceptions in this book: as already indicated, practically everything is exquisite.

The quality of the book as a whole with respect to the properties established as relevant at the beginning of the content part of this review -- comprehensiveness, clarity, breadth of coverage, etc. -- is to be judged positively. The topics that have taken center stage in pragmatics in the last decades -- from implicature to syntax-pragmatics interface -- are given a detailed, informative, up-to-date and balanced account. In this respect, Horn and Ward's ''Handbook of Pragmatics'' emulates the best reference work to date, Levinson's classical ''Pragmatics'' (1983). Actually, a comparison with Levinson's book reveals how much has been done in the last twenty-odd years: not only has our understanding of the fundamental issues, like semantics-pragmatics distinction, significantly changed since the early Eighties (expansion in depth), the pragmatic perspective has become definitely established as one of the major ways of thinking about language, resulting in a large body of research on syntax, lexicon, language change, language acquisition, etc., which either incorporates or is entirely based on the conceptual framework provided by pragmatics (expansion in breadth). The greatest merit of ''The Handbook of Pragmatics'' is perhaps not so much the good coverage of the expansion in depth -- it is something you would expect from every new reference work -- but rather the great effort the editors have invested in planning the book so as to capture the immense expansion of pragmatics in breadth. The part of the Handbook dubbed ''Pragmatics and its Interfaces'' bears witness to this laudable effort, as well as the inclusion of a section devoted entirely to discourse, which does full justice to the developments in both dynamic semantics, with its focus on meaning as context enrichment, and syntax, in which much work has been done on the influence of discourse on sentence form.

This excessive praise of Horn and Ward's editorial work should not obscure the fact that the Handbook on the whole also has its weaknesses. First, some chapters deal with very specific issues, which a handbook of a linguistic discipline need not necessarily feature. For instance, the topics tackled in Ward and Birner's chapter on the non-canonical word order in English, Stainton's chapter on subpropositional utterances or Kuno's work on empathy (even though all these papers are of high quality) could have been given a more concise account in Green's chapter on syntax and pragmatics or in a more generally conceived chapter on ellipsis than Kehler and Ward's paper on VP ellipsis is. There is also some overlapping which seems unnecessary, such as the partial repetition of Recanati's account of the semantics-pragmatics distinction in Kent Bach's ''Pragmatics and the Philosophy of Language'' (though, I assume this is only a reviewer's problem, since it is not very probable there will be many people who will read all 850 pages from cover to cover).

On the other hand, some important approaches to pragmatics have received only insufficient attention. Thus I see no good reason why there is no chapter on pragmatics and psycholinguistics/psychology. The psychological, experimental approach to pragmatic phenomena is mentioned in Eve Clark's ''Pragmatics and Language Acquisition'' from the viewpoint of language acquisition, and in Wilson & Sperber's ''Relevance Theory'', from the viewpoint of Relevance Theory. But the tradition of experimental pragmatics is neither confined to these issues, nor does it commence with the (mostly) relevance-theoretic collection of articles edited by Noveck & Sperber (2004): Since the pioneering works of Robert Krauss (e.g. Krauss & Weinheimer 1966, 1967), Herbert Clark (e.g. Clark & Lucy 1975, Clark & Haviland 1977, Clark 1979), Raymond Gibbs (e.g. Gibbs 1982, 1983), and others, there has been an immense body of psychological and psycholinguistic literature on such 'narrow' pragmatic topics as literal vs. figurative meaning, reference, indirect speech acts, irony and implicature, etc. (see Clark 1992 and 1996, Gibbs 1999, and especially Krauss & Fussell 1996 for excellent surveys). Further, more use could have been made of Argumentation Theory (mentioned only by Blakemore and Recanati), which is in many respects a radical alternative to the Gricean model underlying directly or indirectly most of the papers in the Handbook (Ducrot 1984; see also van Eemeren & Grootendorst 2004 for a different understanding of argumentation).

In a similar vein, some important topics of modern pragmatics are mentioned only in passing or they do not receive the attention they deserve given the place they occupy in the contemporary research. First of all, the fundamental question of literal and nonliteral meaning in general and of metaphor/metonymy in particular is only partly covered by Nunberg's paper on deferred reference and merely touched upon by Recanati and Wilson & Sperber. The prolonged and lively discussion of ambiguity, vagueness and polysemy and their semantic or pragmatic roots (cp. e.g. Nunberg 1979, Geeraerts 1993, Behrens 1998, 2002, Ravin & Leacock 2000), the role metaphor and metonymy play in much of cognitive linguistics (e.g. Lakoff 1987; Gibbs & Steen 1999, Dirven & Pörings 2002) and the theoretical relevance of the issue of literal meaning (cp. e.g. Searle 1978, 1979, Gibbs 1984, 2002, Dascal 1987, Recanati 2004) -- all this not only justifies, it rather demands a more comprehensive account than the partial coverage in Nunberg's, Recanati's and Wilson & Sperber's papers. Irony, cursorily mentioned only by Wilson & Sperber, is yet another topic which should have received more attention, not only in view of the amount of research wholly or partially devoted to it (cp. Colebrook 2004 for an overview), but also in view of the theoretical relevance of irony in defining the notion of saying (Grice was compelled to resort to the notion of ''making as if to say'' in order to account for irony, which seriously undermines the purely semantic view of saying -- cp. Recanati 2003 for a discussion). Finally, I would like to have seen a separate chapter devoted to intentionality. Given the central role communicative intentions play in most of the classical and modern pragmatics, from Grice's non-natural meaning (Grice 1957) to the intentionalist approaches to discourse like that of Asher & Lascarides (1994) and Roberts (1996), it would be extremely useful to have an authoritative article on the topic instead of sporadic mentions scattered all over the book (cp. overviews in Cohen et al. (1990), Duranti (2000), and Mann (2003)).

Apart from these omissions, Horn and Ward's ''Handbook of Pragmatics'' faithfully mirrors the current pragmatic landscape (i.e. the landscape of the 'narrow' pragmatics), both in good and in bad. Let me first say a couple of words on what is 'bad', so that I may end this review with the deserved praise of both the editors and the contributors.

Two features characterizing 'narrow' pragmatics also characterize much of the Handbook: monolingualism and disregard of other research traditions. Almost all papers, with the notable exception of Levinson's ''Deixis'', Huang's ''Anaphora'' and Goldberg's ''Pragmatics and Argument Structure'', are based exclusively on English data, a fact deplored by some of the authors (Abbott, p.148; Ward & Birner, p. 173, Green, p. 416). Working with English data has the advantage of immediate accessibility of the examples to the international readership, but it also has one serious drawback (apart from the rather trivial issue of political correctness): in confining oneself to the data from only one language, a number of important theoretical generalizations may be lost. Obviously, this holds true for all fields of applied pragmatics: the interaction of pragmatics and grammar or lexicon, for instance, certainly gives quite different results in different languages. Actually, this is one important desideratum in pragmatic research -- to try and uncover parameters of cross-linguistic variation in the pragmatic interfaces. However, it will never loose its status of a desideratum if the researchers keep on confining themselves to English. Perhaps less obvious is the fact that a confrontation with the linguistic diversity can also be profitable for theoretical pragmatics. Recall, however, the important insights gained in the specificity research through an analysis of the Turkish case marking (Enç 1991). Or, to name one simple example from the book under review: Carston, demonstrating the creation of ad hoc concepts on the example of the adjective 'happy', says that ''I am happy'' may be used to denote that the speaker is ''in a steady state of low-key well-being, [...] that she is experiencing a moment of intense joy, [...] that she is satisfied with the outcome of some negotiation, etc.'' (p. 642). In two languages that I have a fairly good command of, German and Serbian/Croatian, the first two ad hoc extensions of the roughly equivalent adjectives (glücklich and sretan, respectively) are quite possible, while the third one seems to be pragmatically infelicitous. In contexts comparable to that of a successfully accomplished negotiation, you would not say ''Ich bin glücklich'' or ''Sretan sam'' (because 'glücklich' and 'sretan' would be automatically associated with one of the two first mentioned ad hoc concepts), but you would have to use one of the adjectives roughly corresponding to English 'pleased' instead. There are a number of ways in which this can be interpreted: it may be the case that the structure of the lexicon (both the structure of semantic fields and the make-up of lexical units themselves) restricts the creation of ad hoc concepts in some relevant way, or it is simply a matter of some kind of discourse conventionalization, or it is something else. Be it how it may, this kind of language (or culture) dependent restrictions on the formation of ad hoc concepts is a potentially relevant theoretical issue which cannot be raised unless more than one language is considered.

The second point -- the lack of awareness of other research traditions -- is not the exclusive property of pragmatics, but rather a pervasive feature of modern linguistics in general. As in the case of pragmatic monolingualism, this is not reprehensive merely for the reasons of political correctness (it is not courteous not to know what other colleagues are doing), but also and primarily because this self-imposed confinement to the works of those who work in the same theoretical framework, leads to a state of an apparently self-evident consensus; this, in turn, leads to a situation in which the fundamental postulates are no longer questioned, but rather taken for granted -- which is, needless to say, an ideal prerequisite for a stagnation of a scientific paradigm. Let me illustrate this with a couple of examples. Since the early days of Gricean pragmatics, there have been attempts to show that its conception of language and communication is not valid or not universally valid. These attacks come from different quarters -- the universality of maxims, for instance, has been questioned from the viewpoints of linguistic anthropology (Ochs Keenan 1976) and of intercultural communication (Wierzbicka 1991); discourse analysts (e.g. Sarangi & Slembrouck 1992) and philosophers (e.g. Davis 1998) have argued against cooperativeness of the interlocutors as the basis of communication, relevance theorists (Sperber & Wilson 1986) and experimental psychologists (e.g. Wyer & Gruenfeld 1995, Krauss & Fussell 1996) have expressed doubts about the psychological plausibility of the Gricean interpretation process, and Grice's properties of implicatures (cancellability, detachability, etc.) have been shown not to be the exclusive domain of non-conventional meanings (Sadock 1978); there are also some frontal attacks on the Gricean program as a whole (Davis 1998). Defenders have not been less numerous and less eloquent -- Green (1990), Levinson (1989, 2000) Saul (2002a, 2002b), Green (2002), to name just a few. In ''The Handbook of Pragmatics'', this prolonged argument is briefly mentioned only on pp. 8 and 28 (note 19) (in Horn's ''Implicature'') and commented upon in a very cursory manner. I do not intend to claim that all objections to the Gricean program are justified or even plausible, but I do think that the dominant pragmatic paradigm would profit greatly from answering them in more detail and with more intellectual effort, and of course, that the readers of ''The Handbook of Pragmatics'' should share in this profit. Similar critical tones on the speech act theory (e.g. those from the conversation analysts' perspective [Goodwin & Heritage 1990, Schegloff 1992] and from the perspective of linguistic anthropology [Duranti 1997]) are not mentioned at all in the Handbook (though see p. 54). There are also cases where no explicit critique is involved, but the object of 'alien' research traditions is identical or similar to that presented in the Handbook, so that it would have been a good idea to also mention this 'alien' point of view, at least for the sake of completeness. To name just one example: In the discussion of procedural meanings and of the role of context in interpretation, a short discussion of Gumperz' important notions of 'contextualization' and 'contextualization cue' (Gumperz 1982), perhaps even a brief overview of Hymes and Gumperz' Ethnography of Communication (Gumperz & Hymes 1972), would have significantly contributed to the richness of the argument.

These objections, to emphasize the point again, should not be understood (purely) as a critique of Horn and Ward's ''Handbook'', they pertain rather to the linguistic subdiscipline, the 'narrow' pragmatics, this book is intended to cover and it is therefore only logical that what is bad in a discipline is also reflected in the handbook describing it. The development of pragmatics in the last couple of decades, however, is to be judged positively on the whole, and the main merit of the Handbook lies in its extensive coverage of this positive development. It provides a picture of an expanding field of research which slowly but steadily encroaches upon the traditional territories of semantics, syntax, morphology, etc., thereby offering systematic and principled accounts of previously enigmatic phenomena. For this reason, certain reservations notwithstanding, I can only once again quote Ivan Sag's cover text: ''Quality: superb. Quantity: vast. Relation: everything there is that's relevant to pragmatics. Manner: as clear as it gets!''

Dejan Matić received his Ph.D. in General Linguistics in 2003 (University of Cologne, Germany) and is currently working as a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow at the University of Cologne. He has published on information structure, language contact, syntax of copular clauses, discourse pragmatics and experimental pragmatics.